Sci-Tech news

• This is what MidJourney AI thinks the coronation of King Charles will look like on May 6

  04-03-2023 14:16 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  The upcoming coronation of King Charles III is the most hotly anticipated event this year - so MailOnline asked an AI bot to provide a sneak peak
  
  Read more

• I picked Task Manager 'to see how ready AI is for primetime… or if it would just degrade to slop' – OG dev talks to The Reg

  24-08-2026 15:03 via theregister.com
  
  The author of the original legendary 1996 Windows Task Manager has released new versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux, telling The Reg the project started life as a way to see if vibe coding could produce something useful. "I picked Task Manager as a simpler target to see how ready AI is for primetime… or if it would just degrade to slop," former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer told us. "And it turns out it depends on what you ask for, largely! And what you test and instrument. It's like h
  
  Read more

• AliExpress accused of fingerprinting shoppers with silent audio trick that also muted a dev's headphones

  24-08-2026 14:32 via theregister.com
  
  Developer Matt Callaghan claims he caught Alibaba trying to track web users by playing sounds through browsers vulnerable to audio fingerprinting. The software engineer drew attention to the issue late last week after investigating why his Bluetooth headphones stopped playing music whenever he visited Alibaba’s website. “Recently I ran into a strange problem with my Bluetooth headphones,” Callaghan wrote. “They support multipoint Bluetooth audio, so they can be connected
  
  Read more

• US datacenters tripled their water footprint in 10 years

  24-08-2026 14:01 via theregister.com
  
  Datacenters in America used about 17 billion gallons of water during 2023, triple the amount they used a decade earlier in 2014, according to an estimate from US Congressional Research Service (CRS). In a recent report published by the Library of Congress, the CRS casts an eye over how server farms use water, looks at potential options to reduce this, and discusses the current federal role in overseeing the use of H2O by operators. The CRS notes the federal government does not systematically ass
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Back to buttons? British drivers call for car manufacturers to ditch touchscreens in favour of physical dials

  24-08-2026 13:47 via dailymail.com
  
  A new survey has revealed that more than half (51 per cent) of UK drivers wish cars still used physical dials for key functions.
  
  Read more

• World's oldest lab-grown human brains reach seven years old - and scientists think they may have 'recorded the passage of time'

  24-08-2026 13:30 via dailymail.com
  
  The world's oldest lab-grown human brains have reached seven years old, scientists have revealed.
  
  Read more

• $1T investment giant Apollo breached after social engineering attack

  24-08-2026 13:29 via theregister.com
  
  Apollo Global Management has admitted that attackers talked their way into its cloud systems and got their hands on Social Security numbers and other personal information. The investment giant disclosed the breach in a notification filed with California's attorney general, saying it had suffered a "social engineering incident" that resulted in unauthorized access to "certain cloud platforms" between July 6 and July 10. Apollo isn't saying which cloud platforms were compromised, how the attackers
  
  Read more

• AI vendors are turning to custom hardware as Microsoft winds back the clock on Windows

  24-08-2026 12:57 via theregister.com
  
  KETTLE This week, we learned a lot more about what’s going on inside the datacenter. GPUs may still be king but their exclusive reign on the rack is over. The taskbar's supremacy at the bottom of the desktop may be coming to an end too. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. Those platforms also let you subscribe to Kettle, so you are always notified when the latest episode goes live. Register Systems Edit
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Security vets rally around $4 paper password books for sale in Australia

  24-08-2026 12:17 via theregister.com
  
  Are you sick and tired of maintaining a password manager? Struggling with choosing the right one for you? Well, readers who live Down Under can get themselves down to their local AusPost branch where they can pick up an old-school alternative for just AU$4.90 (US$3.51). Password books are something of a historical relic, phased out largely because of the scrutiny associated with using one and the now-gray-haired elders who once scoffed at the mere notion of such an opsec crime. They might not be
  
  Read more

• Meet Britain's newest dog breeds! Braque du Bourbonnais and Epagneul Français are officially recognised - making them the 229th and 230th breeds in the UK

  24-08-2026 11:46 via dailymail.com
  
  The Royal Kennel Club has officially granted recognition to the Braque du Bourbonnais and Epagneul Français - two gundog breeds from France.
  
  Read more

• AI could help terrorists build bombs and bioweapons, report warns

  24-08-2026 11:29 via dailymail.com
  
  AI could help terrorist groups build sophisticated biological and chemical weapons, a report has warned.
  
  Read more

• Canonical backs quest to translate mountains of C into safe Rust with AI

  24-08-2026 11:27 via theregister.com
  
  Canonical's fondness for AI and Rust is no secret. Now it is co-funding a three-year PhD project investigating whether the former can translate large C codebases into the latter. Engineering veep Jon Seager announced the investment on Ubuntu's Discourse forum. The PhD project will be conducted at the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group. So don't panic. This is not an announcement that Canonical will turn the bots loose to rewrite all of Ubuntu as Rusty slop. (For a start
  
  Read more

• UK's rarest bird of prey rears new chicks in secret location

  24-08-2026 10:31 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The Montagu Harrier successfully nested for the second year running in the same secret location.
  
  Read more

• Software should work, and talking about it needn't be boring

  24-08-2026 10:31 via theregister.com
  
  OPINION DVD is one of those technologies that dominated for barely a generation yet left a permanent cultural mark. It made high-quality video cheap enough for mass distribution, popularized the TV series boxed set, and encouraged its gluttonous consequence: binge viewing. Streaming and capacious storage have since pushed optical media toward irrelevance. There may no longer be a box, but the boxed-set mentality remains, and we still binge like Roman emperors. It is a genuinely new way of absorb
  
  Read more

• China calls off ambitious ice-hunting moonshot a day before flight

  24-08-2026 09:11 via theregister.com
  
  China’s Manned Space Agency (CMSA) on Sunday cancelled a planned Monday moonshot launch. The mission plan for Chang'e 7 calls for it to send a lander to a region near the Moon’s South Pole, in a location thought likely to contain ice in deep craters. The lander carries two other vehicles: a wheeled rover, and a hopper. China wants to test the latter to see if it can jump over crater rims to look for ice, and then hop out again and continue exploring. The lander is also important to C
  
  Read more

• Batch file automated a clean-up job, then fouled itself by deleting the wrong directory

  24-08-2026 08:31 via theregister.com
  
  WHO, ME? Welcome to another installment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column in which The Register opens the working week with your tales of IT woe. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Pascal," who once worked for a company that had just acquired its first Exchange server, home to around 600 mailboxes. "The IT manager was keen we kept on top of the performance of the Information Store and suggested we take the box offline once a week to defrag it," Pascal told The Register
  
  Read more

• World-First Biological Data Center Uses 16 Million Living Human Neurons To Process Data

  24-08-2026 05:04 via technocracy.news
  
  The company says that human neurons are harvested from blood and then turned into stem cells. It assures the public that the cells are not taken from human brains or fetal tissue. The neurons sit on a microelectrode array (MEA): a glass/silicon chip covered with hundreds to thousands of tiny electrodes that can both stimulate and record.The public pitch is the AI power crisis, not FLOPS. Cortical Labs and DayOne argue wetware can process information at a fraction of a GPU rack’s wattage. C
  
  Read more

• AI-driven upgrade of communications energy storage empowers a new energy ecosystem for multiple industries

  24-08-2026 02:00 via theregister.com
  
  AI datacenters have become a major driver of rising electricity consumption, but AI doesn't just happen in a datacenter. The telecommunications networks connecting datacenters to businesses and consumers are themselves major electricity consumers. 5G and its successors mean ever higher energy demands. Newer comms architectures deliver more bandwidth and richer services, but they also require denser cells, and 5G infrastructure such as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas consumes more
  
  Read more

• Ancient ‘Who owns Linux?’ case now has one foot very deep in the grave

  24-08-2026 01:50 via theregister.com
  
  The long legal battle over ownership of Linux is closer than ever to ending, after a panel of three judges ruled a claim against IBM and Red Hat isn’t valid, and that time has expired for further action. This story starts in 1998 when IBM decided the world needed a single version of UNIX capable of running on multiple processor architectures. To make that happen, Big Blue allied with a company called the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) which made a version of UNIX for x86 CPUs. Intel and Sequen
  
  Read more

• Revealed: The most ridiculous calls to 101 - as police start using AI to screen for time-wasters

  24-08-2026 01:41 via dailymail.com
  
  The most ridiculous calls to the service have been revealed, and they range from the silly to the absurd.
  
  Read more

• France links sharp rise in drownings to heatwaves

  23-08-2026 19:39 via bbc.co.uk
  
  A government minister says people have been taking risks by going into the water, with 301 deaths since 19 June.
  
  Read more

• Food prices predicted to surge in 2027 as two global threats collide, JPMorgan warns

  23-08-2026 18:23 via dailymail.com
  
  JPMorgan has warned that Americans could soon be hit by a grocery-price surge as two global threats collide to squeeze the world's food supply.
  
  Read more

• I was a church leader. There are secret Bible clues about alien life and I have been threatened for exposing them before... but people must be ready

  23-08-2026 17:29 via dailymail.com
  
  Hints in the Bible suggest that the stories of the Old Testament actually refer to a group of advanced beings - and the tales are echoed in other ancient texts.
  
  Read more

• Is nothing sacred? Scientists discover adding sweetener to red wine makes it more appealing for Gen Z

  23-08-2026 17:27 via dailymail.com
  
  Red wine is proving less of a hit with today's younger drinkers, who struggle with its dry, bitter taste. Now, experts have come up with a controversial solution - making it sweeter to appeal to Gen Z.
  
  Read more

• How Cursor beat Git's scalability shortcomings

  23-08-2026 15:45 via theregister.com
  
  Developers recently burned by GitHub’s system outages should take note that there are other ways to manage Git at scale. One approach, recently put into action by Cursor, is to build the distributed version control system on object storage. A recent post from Cursor principal systems engineer Vicent Martí explains how the SpaceX subsidiary worked through its scaling issues with the notoriously fickle Git distributed version control system. The post explains how Cursor arrived at an
  
  Read more

• The retro diet food making a comeback... experts reveal if the beloved 80s 'it' ingredient is key to weight loss

  23-08-2026 15:08 via dailymail.com
  
  Once the bland poster child of 1980s diet culture, this cheap ingredient is suddenly having a very loud second act.
  
  Read more

• An ultra-rare piece of Microsoft history could be hiding on your shelf

  23-08-2026 14:32 via theregister.com
  
  In a future edition of The Antiques Roadshow, the hosts might get all excited about a mint Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows… with a sticker on the box instead of a printed Tetris promotion. Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen explained the reasoning behind using the sticker instead of simply printing what was in the box. Microsoft hadn't locked down the rights for Tetris before the first print run of the packaging, so went with what it had. The Microsoft Entertainment Pack for
  
  Read more

• Mysterious 'lost continent' linked to alien beings may have finally been located

  23-08-2026 14:06 via dailymail.com
  
  Interest in a mysterious 'lost continent' where believers claim an advanced civilization once existed has been rekindled thanks to claims science has discovered its true location.
  
  Read more

• Revealed: The 'Golden Quartet' of moves that boost the chance of female orgasm, according to scientists

  23-08-2026 13:54 via dailymail.com
  
  In news that will come as music to the ears of women around the world, scientists have uncovered the 'Golden Quartet' of moves that boost the chance of reaching the 'Big O'.
  
  Read more

• Why Super El Niño will wreak havoc on Britain this winter: Scientists reveal how the climate event in the Pacific will spark cold and stormy weather in the UK

  23-08-2026 12:11 via dailymail.com
  
  After months of record-breaking heat, Brits have been told to brace for a cold and stormy winter, thanks to the Super El Niño that's building in the Pacific Ocean.
  
  Read more

Follow @scitech_UK on Twitter!